YAAN-6
Jake’s pattern of entity was shining, coiling, undulating beyond his usual brightness (and his was an unusually bright pattern), with what I thought of as a powder brilliance: that is, a pattern-residue rose from many of the tendrils of his being, spreading outward like mist, or powder, retaining the light of his pattern as it did and as it floated through the air like unto fairy dust, and landed all around him, on the ground, on the wood hut behind him, and even on the farmers facing him, where it shone another moment, and finally evaporated, an echo of it glowing in the grass with a faint effervescence.
I thought for a moment that this new luminescent, exhilarating powder brilliance was an indication that his pattern was going to heal itself. A whole section of his entity pattern was rent asunder, and had been rent asunder as long as I’d known him. In a place where coils and tendrils and multi-colored strands should have interwoven and completed the design of his being in a scintillating punctuation of beauty, there was a hole. When I’d first seen him, years ago, I’d thought him on the verge of pulling apart, and even now I was always worried that he might suddenly unravel; but two solitary threads of nibun, perpendicular to each other, locked the opposing arcs of the hole in his pattern to each other, keeping the damage from growing.
More than that, sensitive, sinuous tendrils of yammial weaving in and out of these nibun threads added a quality of flexibility to the strength of resistance of the nibun, producing strands unique (of anybody I’d yet seen) to Jake that could, I felt sure, judging by their flow and rhythm, laid alongside the flow and rhythm of his pattern as a whole, heal him. I had always thought he would heal himself, but he never did, and because I had no doubt that he could, it seemed to me, even though I knew he couldn’t see himself, that he was refusing to, and I wondered when he would. And now, because of the extra pulse and shine of his pattern, this powder brilliance, I thought the time had come, but it hadn’t; he didn’t heal himself.
I followed Rook and when he stopped, I stopped; but it wasn’t to Jake’s side that we came, but to a position diagonal from both Jake and the four farmhands who faced him, as if instead of coming to Jake’s aid, we were coming as mediators. I was vaguely aware of how cold it was, and that it seemed to be getting colder, and yet I felt hot. My blood was up, as Mrs. Camden would have said.
It was clear to me that the little dragon, Ragahootoo, had anticipated, rather than seen, or known, what was going to happen, because the little mob couldn’t have arrived very long before we did, and despite being armed with their rakes and shovels and pitchforks, they were waiting for the men coming from the east and west to arrive to reinforce their numbers.
Each of the individual patterns of the farmers that constituted this mob were agitated, with large entity strands coiling and roiling about, but these were of no consequence, for they had no direction, or focus. The threat came from a different pattern that had formed around them and in front of them, which was comprised of their individual patterns but was separate from them. It was this pattern that had focus, with large aggressive cobra-like strands that had reared up, arched, and formed a taut, vibrating arrow of menace that was trained on our little log hut. Yet, a few strands of Jake’s entity pattern surrounded this group pattern, and with tiny quasi-solid tendrils held it in place—tenuously, I thought. If it got any bigger, any stronger, which it would, it seemed to me, when Hector and the other men arrived, Jake’s pattern wouldn’t be able to contain it, and the men’s physical presences, held in check by the interaction of these patterns, would be released to act.
As the other men, including Hector drew close and joined the group, somebody demanded, “Where is it, Exeter?”
Jake, smiling, and to all appearances at ease (though I knew he wasn’t), asked, “Where’s what, Knothead?” It was Magristic Stoat, who Jake always called Knothead, who had asked him the question. He always called Magristic’s brother Harrol, “Bonehead.”
Magristic bristled, “Aww, you…”
Hector interrupted, “You know what he means, Exeter, the beast.”
Leaning back against the logs of the hut, pushing his hands into the pockets of his jacket, and swinging his right boot in front of his left ankle, Jake said, in a tone that matched his posture, “I haven’t seen any beasts. I did see a friendly fellow named Drud, though. He’s inside with Mrs. Yaan.” Mrs. Yaan was the name he used for Mom when he talked to the other farmhands. When he talked to Rook, me, or Mom, he called her “Itty,” or “Little Captain.”
“Drud?” someone asked, with incredulity.
“That’s right,” Jake confirmed, with an innocent smile.
“You’ve got a name for that thing?!” This was said with incredulity as well, and also outrage. The lead aggressor strand of the group pattern reared up as if to strike, but Jake faced them without flinching, just as he faced a much greater foe some months later.
On that occasion, I had been hanging out at home alone for most of the day, waiting for Mrs. Camden to arrive, and had decided mid-afternoon to walk out to Lake Latalla. Mom, who had departed on one of her sporadic trips that morning, had of course admonished me to stay indoors until Mrs. Camden arrived, but, having the outdoor itch that day, I concluded, after a brief internal debate, that in lieu of staying home, a note to Mrs. Camden left on the dinner table telling her I was going out to Lake Latalla, and instructing her to follow me, would be sufficient.
“Come out to Lake Latalla if you want to meet some of my new friends,” I wrote, hoping that would entice her if she were on the fence about making the trip. In the time since she, Jake, Rook, and I had gone out to Lake Latalla, I had made the acquaintance of several fairies and forest elves, or Kee and Jaji as they called themselves, and I was hoping that at least one of them would be bold enough to come out of the shadows and talk to Mrs. Camden. I knew she would be delighted.
Once outside, however, my outdoor fever waned, perhaps the severity of it having been magnified by the act of waiting, which, as Mom was never slow to point out, has a tendency to distort things. Cooped up all day, I had assumed that a trip all the way out to the magnificence of Latalla would be needed to alleviate the dingy lethargy that a prolonged sojourn indoors often induced; but I found that simply being outside in the dry cool splendor of late Sporch, traipsing across green pastures and waist-high fields of corn, did the trick; and I decided that rather than risk aggravating Mrs. Camden by making her tromp all the way out to Latalla after in all likelihood having come a long way today, already, I would go find Rook and/or Jake, and engage them in some kind of philosophical discourse.
This was something I often did, it so delighted me to listen to them banter, notwithstanding the insights both of them provided about things. I’d ask them a question, and then either just sit back and listen to them discuss it, or, if at first they didn’t seem to have much to say about the matter, prompt the conversation along myself until they grew more interested. A few days ago, I’d asked them, “If we accept as a given that all life is equally sacred,” to which of course Jake had broken in and said, “That’s a pretty big given you’re pinning us down with, there,” which interrupted the shadow thinking that I had to resort to in order to communicate with others, but which after years of practicing I had managed to learn how to hold in my mind even when its flow was obstructed, so that I was able to go on, now, even with the interruption, with only a marginal deterioration in the clarity of my question: “But accepting it for argument’s sake, let’s say that you found yourself in a situation in which a person, let’s say a woman since you guys are men [this was something I thought Mom would say, and with some pointedness, so I threw it in] needs your help or she will die. If you try to save her, her chance of surviving is still less than fifty percent, and there is, as well, a greater than fifty percent chance that you will die in the effort to save her. If you don’t try to save her, she has a zero percent chance of surviving and you have a one hundred percent chance. Accepting the premise that all life is equally sacred, should you try to save her?”
Jake said, “Obviously not. The composite of two sub-fifty percent chances is less than the one hundred percent chance you have of surviving if you do nothing. You might gamble you could save both her and yourself, and maybe you’d win, but your question suggests a bigger picture, a bigger stage, in which many others are faced with the same situation, and on that stage, if each of these others were to try to save the person in need, then at the end of all of that selflessness and bravado and heroism, there would be fewer people still living their equally sacred lives than there would be if all of these heroes saved themselves.”
Rook responded, “Exeter’s logic is, as always, impeccable, but I feel like I’d try to save the woman, even so,” to which Jake said, “Well, that would just be stupid; you’d be un-dercutting your own belief—misguided though it may be, it is what you believe. I can see making such a disastrous choice if you were unimaginably bad at arithmetic, but realizing that…” to which Rook interrupted, “You’re right, of course, but nevertheless, I feel like I would attempt to save the woman, even so,” and they went back and forth like that for awhile thereafter, to my great amusement.
Another time, I asked them if they thought the animal denizens of the farm minded being eaten. It had come to my attention that some of the tasty vittles I was accustomed to enjoying in the evening were the cooked remnants of the beings I walked among during the day, and in trying to determine whether or not to continue the practice of eating them, I had come to the conclusion that if they didn’t mind being eaten, I would continue to eat them, but if they did, I wouldn’t. I hoped I would find that they didn’t mind. I didn’t think I would mind being eaten—once I was dead. In fact, I thought it might be an honor to be able to provide nutrition to some hungry entity. However, to be eaten, I would have to die, and I didn’t want that, and wouldn’t be willing to die to provide food for anybody, no matter how hungry they were. If I happened to die accidentally, then, yes, they could eat me, but otherwise, no. And I had to admit that it wasn’t likely that many of the chickens or cows were dying accidentally, so the real question wasn’t whether they minded being eaten, but whether they minded being killed. The obvious answer to that question was that, yes, of course they minded being killed, but I thought maybe if I asked enough people, somebody would come up with a convincing line of reasoning that would allow me to continue on with my current diet.
I had started my investigation by asking Mom, “Mom, do the cows and chickens mind being killed so that we can eat them?” and continuing her nine-year string (I was nine at the time) of never answering a question, she said, “Why don’t you ask around,” which is just what I did, engaging the ever-taciturn Golden Gerbil in a very brief conversation on the way to Farmer Green’s farm, and then stopping by Tameedah’s before seeking out the true targets of my inquiry.
When I found Rook with a large brush and a bucket of oil, sealing a cow barn, I dove right in: “Do the cows and chickens mind being killed so that we can eat them?”
Unsurprised by my question, he considered my quandary as he continued to coat the barn. After a few moments, he nodded in the direction of Jake, who was trudging across the cowyard towards us, and said “Yon Exeter would say that cows and chickens not being self-aware, to say they ‘mind’ something would be to ascribe human characteristics to them—that they would by instinct try to avoid being killed, but ‘minding’ it wouldn’t be true. I believe that he would say that if consciousness survived after death, a human would probably resent your having killed him, a cow or chicken probably wouldn’t. They might fear you; but they wouldn’t be aware that you had made a conscious decision to kill, versus not to kill them, and therefore even under the bold assumption that they could feel resentment, which yon Exeter would say was doubtful, they couldn’t hold your decision against you.”
“Actually,” Jake said, arriving, “Yon Exeter would say, of course they don’t mind it, they don’t even know it. They’re brainless lumps of meat.”
Disregarding what to me, considering how he convened with the oxen when he was driving the plow, was an obviously insincere comment, I said, to Rook, “So it’s all right to eat them, then?”
Loading his brush with more oil from his can, he said, “Well, I don’t know that you can draw that conclusion from the facts presented. I’m not saying it’s not okay to eat up the guys,” (he often referred to the bulls and roosters as ‘the guys’), “but if you thought it wasn’t okay, I don’t think we’ve said anything that would convince you it was. Yon Exeter, oh there you are, would say that being unaware of pain or injustice, or of the intent that went into killing you, is a greater suffering than being aware of it. He says that just because you don’t know you’re a slave doesn’t mean you’re not one.”
Jake looked at me and said, with exaggerated non-expression, “Shamodes likes to attribute his convolutions to me.”
I said, “Well, what do you think, Rook?”
With an exaggerated non-expression of his own, he said, “Well, Exeter would say that I thought…”
I cut him off with as disapproving a stare as I could muster, and he said, raising an eyebrow, “Well on Shamokin not much meat is eaten. I don’t like it myself—yon Exeter,” he nodded at Jake, who had moved down the way a little bit and was, from the top of a ladder, spreading oil on the barn himself, “is more of a potato man, though he does eat his share of meat, too.”
It occurred to me that he’d told me a few weeks earlier that he’d been left on this world as an infant and had no memory or knowledge of his home world, and that, thus, there was no way he could know whether meat was eaten on Shamokin or not, but I decided to overlook that for the time being. “Really? You don’t like meat?”
He surveyed his work, filled in a couple spots he’d missed, and explained, “No, there aren’t any big animals on Shamokin, not many animals of any sort, some rodents. If we ate meat, it would have to be other people. And that’s inconvenient: I mean, if you eat an animal’s brother, he probably won’t even be aware that you did, and even if he is, he’ll just run away from you to avoid getting killed himself; but if you kill a human’s brother, he’ll probably try to kill you. So, it’s a tricky proposition, eating other people—so I think historically, we Shamokinites just avoided that trouble, and ate plants. So we’re more suited to plants. Animals just taste bad to us.”
An element, some would say weakness, of Rook’s easy-going nature was that he seemed unable to sense when an issue or topic was important to you, and was, thus, wont to ramble away from what you wanted him to talk about unless you kept him to task; and now sensing that he was roaming off the topic, I blurted, “Tameedah said I would starve if I stopped eating animals!” Having brought him back to my agenda, I amended, “Well, not starve, but that I wouldn’t get the nutrition I needed, and might get weak bones or something.”
Rook glanced at Jake, and getting no help there, said, after another moment’s consideration, “I’m not an anatomist,”—this seemed the wrong word to me, but I let it pass—“but that seems inaccurate. Look at me, I’m big and strong, and I’m pretty sure my bones are in good shape. I fell out of that tree the other day,” he nodded at a nearby shade tree, an elm, “and no broken bones, not even a bruise. Of course, the way we Shamokinites metabolize food is no doubt a bit different than the way you Lenimans do, so maybe we shouldn’t go by me.”
“Farmer Green said…”
“You’re not taking anything that nincompoop says as anything resembling sense, are you?” Jake had come down off his ladder, and was coming towards us with a dripping brush.
“Well,” I said (disregarding his unflattering verdict of Farmer Green’s intelligence), “He said ‘Circle of life, child, circle of life.’ That’s what he kept saying to me, and he also said they taste good, you know, cows and chickens, so I should eat them—keep eating them.”
Jake looked surprised. “Wow, that’s not a bad point, the part about them tasting good. The old bird can surprise you now and then.”
“Really?” I frowned. Of all the possible reasons Farmer Green (or anybody else) might have given in support of or against eating “the guys,” most of which I would have expected Jake to dismiss or ridicule, he was picking this one to praise?
Jake’s sharp blue eyes, which always seemed to catch everything, to lock onto the smallest detail of expression or posture, look at it, study it, and wonder at it, caught the gist of my frown, and twinkled. He slapped Rook on the back, and said, “I’ll take over Shamodes.” Rook raised an eyebrow, but stepped aside handing Jake his can as he did. Then, he moved down to where Jake had been working, and took over where Jake had left off.
“Yeah,” Jake said to me, a shrug in his clear voice that belied the hairy old thick strength of his body, “If you enjoy doing something, shouldn’t you do it? You wouldn’t rather do something you don’t enjoy, would you?”
“No,” I said, considering, “I guess not. But what if it’s a bad thing? What if what you enjoy hurts somebody—or any entity, you know?”
“Well, what of it? People can use a little hurtin,” he grunted, putting the stuff on much thicker than Rook did.
“Really?”
“No,” he admitted—I knew he wouldn’t have made such an admission to anybody except Rook or me—“but you wouldn’t enjoy anything that hurt anybody else would you?”
I thought about that. “No…not if I…was aware...” I trailed off. I knew I could never eat any of “the guys” again. I was disappointed, but only for a dropping of a star, as the saying goes; many new paths had suddenly appeared around my ribbon flower; and at a level outside of words something else had occurred to me. I groped for it but couldn’t find it.
Jake pondered a moment, and then said, “I think I know what you’re getting at. Because of your nature, you envision a perfect world, where everybody is enlightened and kind and so forth, and everybody always does what is ‘right.’ And I would say, in a perfect society, what’s right must line up with what you like, or what you want to do.”
Rook put in, “That’s how it is on Shamokin.”
I told Jake, “Shouldn’t it be the other way? Shouldn’t what you like to do line up with what’s right?”
“No, because what’s right is never clear. You can never figure out what exactly is ‘right.’ You can figure out what you like to do, though.”
Rook warned, “He’s a scholar, don’t argue with him.”
I persisted, however. “But what if you like to hurt people?”
“Ultimately that’s a moot point, because if you like to hurt people, then it’s likely other people like to hurt people too, including you, and likely as not, you don’t like being hurt, so liking to hurt people cannot be a quality in a perfect society, at least defining a perfect society as that in which everybody lives exactly as they want to live, does what they want to do—which is what my definition would be—because it (liking to hurt people) as a desirable condition leads to a condition (that of people wanting to hurt you) that is undesirable.”
“Hmmmmm.”
“Of course,” he went on, “this doesn’t mean that everybody in our imperfect society should be allowed to do exactly as they please—but if you have no harm in your heart, you should just do whatever you want to do. I do whatever I want to do.”
“You want to paint this barn?”
Seeming to lose his train of thought, he added, “Of course, there’s probably no such thing as a perfect society. Suffering is, I imagine, inherent, a prime component even, of life, and if you’re…” He noticed me watching him, looking somewhat appalled, and he cut himself off, patted me on the head, and said, “I’m hungry; I think it’s time for a break; anybody for some beef?” and tromped off towards Farmer Green’s house, where I’m sure Tameedah was happy to see him.
“Incidentally,” Rook asked, as we watched Jake go, “What did Golden Gerbil say…about your dilemma? He usually has something interesting to say.”
“Oh, he said that domesticated animals wouldn’t exist if we hadn’t domesticated them, and therefore if we didn’t eat them, they wouldn’t even exist, so for their benefits we should keep domesticating them and eating them. Something like that.”
He frowned (which was rare for him; if he was puzzled by something, usually he just raised an eyebrow). “Hm, that seems like a non-argument to me—a justification, less honest, at least, than just saying, ‘I’m hungry, I need food, and you taste good and will provide me with necessary nutrients, so I’m going to kill you.’ Seems like parents could say the same thing about their babies—their children wouldn’t exist without them, you know. I think yon Exeter would be pretty disgusted by that one. To hold that just because you brought somebody into being that that person should be a slave to you, well, that seems like the height of arrogance to me. They’re still entities.” He finished with conviction, “That’s never done on Shamokin.”
“Yeah,” I murmured, as I wandered away, “Well, we’ll build New Shamokin, someday okay?”
I loved these conversations, and having decided against going out to Latalla, I began formulating a question as I wandered across Farmer Green’s fields hoping to find, preferably, Rook and Jake, but at least one of them. Rushlight had told Tameedah recently that a nearby town had instituted a lottery in which the winner had to share his bounty with ten other people of his choosing, and I was going to ask them what they thought of that. But I couldn’t find either of them; I checked their usual places, I stood on the fence of the little cowyard and scanned the farm, but could catch not even a glimpse of either of their patterns.
Well, I shrugged, I guess they’re not around, so I headed out to Latalla after all, recalling, as I scampered across Farmer Green’s fields, the note I had left for Mrs. Camden.
“Oh yeah,” I murmured, “I told her to go out there; she might be there already! And if she went out there and didn’t find me, she’ll be very worried! Poor Mrs. Camden!” I laughed to myself: she was so imperturbable that when she did get excited about something, it was comical, somehow, albeit touchingly so.
One time, many years before, I had spent the afternoon before she arrived building a ramp of snow up to the roof of our hut, and by coincidence, not design, I happened to reach my objective of jumping from the roof into the blanket of soft snow waiting below just as she entered our yard from Lohu’s field. Her entity pattern, unaffected by malice, anger, threat, or even the presence of yelg wolves, was reaching for me in a desperate frenzy as she raced to my side, and her face, always so placid, was etched with horror and concern as she slid to a stop beside me. I laughed at the incongruity of it, and then I cried because I thought I might have hurt her feelings by laughing at her. She thought I was crying because I was hurt, though, and carried me tenderly inside and after determining that I was okay, told me, “That wasn’t smart,” which was as close to chiding me as she ever came.
It was an easy walk out to Lake Latalla, or, as it turned out, to Lake Twell. Summer was at its height, but dry and cool air had arrived before its welcome in the valley of the four farms and had decided to stay, bringing with it a breath of autumn without affecting the earth-warmth of summer. Outside, one felt cool and refreshed and yet warm to the bone, and as if you could gambol about hours without end. And that’s just what I was doing: gamboling, gaily, zigzagging to Latalla through multitudes of green, soaking in, and dancing in the beauty, and looking forward to introducing Mrs. Camden to at least one of my new friends.
I was rounding Twell, when to my ironic surprise, I caught sight of a familiar pattern, in the field of boulders that lay beyond the quilt of reeds, lakegrass, wildflowers, and spindly willows south of the lake.
“Jake!” I shouted, though I knew he was too far away to hear me. I headed, prancing, towards him through the buggy brush between us, and was perhaps two-thirds of the way to the field of boulders, about to call his name again, when two things happened.
First, I caught sight of Jake—his physical body—and he looked different. That is, he was dressed differently, a lot differently, from any way I’d ever seen him dressed, which made him look different to my eyes (though to my truesight, as Jake, himself, would come to call it, he was unchanged). Instead of the sweat- and grime- soaked fine linen shirt and coarse linen pants that he usually wore, a buckled leather suit of what could only be called armor covered him from neck to toe, weather-beaten and scarred; and he carried a strange axe, longer, with a much narrower blade than the ones the farmers used for woodcutting. And blood was on the axe’s blade, and on his face.
Second, an awful shrieking arose in the southwest, not so loud as earsplitting, with a quality of ice and blood and dripping oiliness in it that turned my insides to stone just to hear. And then Rook, dressed in a less weathered version of the same outfit Jake was wearing, appeared at the southwest edge of the boulder field, at full bore, his long strides shortening the distance between him and Jake with impressive alacrity.
“What are you guys…” I started to say, as I entered the boulder field, but two things cut me short.
First, at the same time as a feeling both of unreasoning panic and sluggish heaviness fell upon me, I saw the patterns of the shrieks tackle Jake and Rook. Scaly, hooked, and nearly colorless gray worms that yet gave the impression of being purple-black, attached themselves to their entity patterns, and seemed to suck a certain vital flexibility from them before dissipating, so that while appearing undamaged, their patterns moved stiffly, with hesitance, their vibrant dances of color slowed and rendered non-rhythmic. In particular, the bands that connected their entity patterns to their body patterns were diminished to the point of being almost indiscernible.
Second, Jake saw me, and the look that crossed his face, of blind grief that eradicated the mask of amusement that always hid even the hint of his entity pattern from the world, choked back any words I might have said.
“Yaan! Yaan!” he said, but that’s all he could spit out.
The screams grew nearer, intensifying the effects on his pattern, and on Rook’s, who came abreast of us, his eyes wide with concern. A scabbard was buckled to his belt, and he was holding a sword, which like Jake’s axe, was streaked with blood.
Breathless, he said, “There’s two of them!”
“Rafers?”
Rook nodded.
“Wraiths?”
Rook nodded again. “At least five or six. And a couple more donks.”
Jake murmured, “What the? Why in the? It doesn’t make sense.”
The shrieks drew yet nearer.
Jake hesitated, which would have been strange to me if I hadn’t seen the stifling effect the wraith screams were having on his entity pattern. He almost seemed to be lost in thought; then, as if suddenly remembering what he was supposed to say, he barked, “Get her out of here!” He pointed east and north—homeward.
Rook gazed at me, uncomprehending, for a moment, then for another moment in sheer surprise, as if only now realizing that I was present. I was afraid he might be frozen, the shrieks having completely inactivated the strands connecting his entity pattern to his body pattern; but then he took me by the hand and was, I thought, about to say, “Come, Lady Yaan,” when, as if remembering something he knew he shouldn’t have forgotten, he turned back to Jake and said, “You should take her.”
Jake said, “No!” with naked unthinking force. He wanted to say more, but couldn’t find the words.
Rook protested, “I’ll have a better chance of fending them off.”
I expected Jake to make some sarcastic remark about how Rook was getting pretty big in his britches, but he didn’t. Instead, with clenched teeth, as if it took a lot of effort just to form the words, he gritted, “I know! That’s why,” and jabbed his arm and finger homeward. He looked sort of like he was trying to hold in a bowel movement. His expressive blue eyes, so striking in the unhewn sun-scorched roughness of his face, met Rook’s black ones, and there passed between them something unspoken, something that had always been unspoken and always would be.
With a short nod, Rook now said what I had expected him to say before, “Come, Lady Yaan,” and giving me the gentlest of tugs, started us homeward. I expected him to lift me onto his shoulders and run home—I’d grown a bit since the trip across Lohu’s field, but he was still quite strong enough to carry me—or at least for the two of us to run along together, me scurrying, him loping; but he was hesitant, indecisive. He just walked, and not even very briskly, and kept looking ahead, towards the distant farm which one could make out, or at least sense, beyond the brush that bordered the field of boulders, as if considering, “Should we run or should walk? Is it too far? Is the brush thick enough to hide us?”
I thought it was too far. It may not have been, but the shrieking of the